Photo of the Week: Week 47

This is by no means a great picture composition wise. It was shot at high noon, the worst time of day to take pictures. I've got a dark haired, dark eyed girl and little miss crazy curls with her pale skin and super blonde hair. Technically speaking, the photo sucks, yet I'm still picking it for my photo of the week. (And I'm picking it over the really freakin' cool picture I took of the vampire bats!) What's great to me about this photograph is that this is the moment where Mia and Grace became friends.

They were born a few weeks apart and have just celebrated their second birthdays. Mia is the daughter of my friends and Grace is my niece. They met for the first time last month when we went pumpkin picking and they did not hit it off. At the beginning of the zoo trip, they once again ignored each other, but I think they bonded over their chasing of the free range peacocks. When you get a pair of two year old's to sit still for a half a second, you don't think about lighting or composition; you just want to take that picture before one of them runs off.

Photo of the Week: Week 11

 

There are tons of pictures where you can see Mia's face, but I like this one better. No offense to Mia, but it captures the pure joy of popping bubbles better. Kinda like this video...

 

Mia, Meaghers & Muffins, oh my!

 

Mia celebrating her first birthday

 

Family Feud outtake at the annual Meagher Portraits

 A plethora of corn muffins made by yours truly

I've once again fallen behind on my blog. Thanksgiving was a busy holiday with my mom being on the disabled list and last week at the office was hectic with a member of my department on vacation. The first couple of pictures speak for themselves, but the last one might have you scratching your head a bit. Let me tell you about recipes...

I've got this issue with reading recipes from my mother's cookbook, which is super ironic because I'm the one that wrote them all out. Granted, I was 12 or something at the time, but my mom liked my handwriting, so there you go. There was an incident that my family still likes to tell about the first time I tried to make chocolate chip cookies. My parents were coming home from vacation, so my oldest brother suggested I make cookies for them. He brought me all the ingredients, gave me the recipe book and left me alone in the kitchen. Biiiiiig mistake. I called him in about a half hour later asking him if he knew where mom kept the extra salt. He looked at me incredulously, "How did you use up all that salt?" I replied that the recipe called for four cups of salt. I went to point this out, and realized that I had skipped a line. It should've been four cups of flour, only about a teaspoon of salt. Whoopsie! There was no way to salvage those cookies.

20 years later, I still can't follow recipes. I ended up having to double the batch of corn muffins to make things better, but it all worked out in the end. Can you guess the one thing that James decided to eat for Thanksgiving? That's right. A corn muffin.

To this day, I don't add salt to any recipe. I learned my lesson!

I've known Mia for one whole year!

It still feels like it was only a few days ago that I shot that picture of Mario and Vanessa in Hawaii at their wedding, so I can only imagine what they're feeling now that their daughter is a year old. Mia's been in front of my camera a lot during the first year of her life: from her first day to her portrait sessions and just goofing around in between.

Here are the most recent set of pictures from Halloween. Mia likes to chase you around the room which puts her in that hard to photograph phase of childhood. She's pretty good with posing for a self portrait for a not yet one year old, don't you think?

Happy Birthday, Mia!